Category: Geekdom

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Erik DiVietro IS Jack Ryan

Erik DiVietro posted this via his MySpace page. As I hate MySpace, and loved this, he gave me permission to cross-post it here.

Erik treated one of those inane e-mail surveys as if he were Jack Ryan, the protagonist in most of Tom Clancy’s novels. (Also, I should note that, just like Erik, I’ve read all of Clancy’s novels. Clancy peaked with The Sum of All Fears—avoid the movie, though—and really hasn’t done remotely as well since.)

I completed this entire survey as Jack Ryan, of the Tom Clancy novels. It is disturbing that I retain this much information about a fictional character, and more so that I do it about MANY fictional characters.

1. If you were to kill a man, horror movie style, which kitchen utensil would you use?
Horror movie style, eh? That’s a tough one. I had an Ayatollah killed by sending in the B-2 bomber with a bunker buster.

2. Did you ever swallow a coin?
No, but I did buy a helicopter once.

3. What was the worst gift you’ve ever received?
That moron Tom Clancy ruined my legacy by writing Teeth of the Tiger

4. What is your most embarrassing childhood memory?
That my father almost arrested John Clark

5. How many kids do you want?
I have four. For some reason, every time my wife and I slept together in another country or in a time of international crisis, she got pregnant again.

6. What’s your moms middle name?
She didn’t have one, but her maiden name was Burke

7. Have you ever operated a fire extinguisher?
In ways the manufacturer never contemplated.

8. What did you eat for breakfast?
I skip breakfast a lot, and Kathy is always getting on my case about it.

9. who do you hate?
Used to communists, then the Japanese and then the Asian-financed terrorists. Oh, and bureaucrats. MAN do I hate them!

10. what do you hope to have accomplished by the end of this year?
When you’re Jack Ryan – there is nothing left to do. I made millions on the stock market; I wrote books; I was a Marine; I’ve been head of the CIA, Vice-President and President. SHOOT…I single-handedly brought peace to Jerusalem. I stole an entire ballistic missile submarine from the Russians AND forced the head of the GRU to defect! There’s nothing I haven’t done.

11. do you have any reallllly crazy relatives?
Apparently, I have two twin psychotic nephews. My daughter is a little strange as well.

12. Did you ever wake up under the influence of NyQuil, completely unable to move?
I was addicted to painkillers after I almost broke my back, and had a drinking problem that forced me out of government service for awhile.

13. Are you feeling nostalgic right now?
I’m a former president of the USA, of course.

14. Did you own a Lite-Brite?
My grandkids do; but it is nothing compared to the NSA command center.

15. Can you dive?
In a wetsuit? No. I’m a terrible swimmer; but I did operate the dive planes of the Red October under Captain Marco Ramius

16. Do you own a mouthpiece for anything?
Not really.

18. Have you ever used a pogo stick?
Is that anything like a 9MM handgun? Or explosives?

19. Who was the most creative bum you’ve ever met, trying to get some money from you?
Probably Ed Kealty.

20. What’s your favorite Jelly Belly jelly bean flavor?
Can of INTERNATIONAL WHOOPIN’. That’s a flavor, right?

21. favorite food you CRAVE?
I love my wife’s cooking. Of course, every time she makes a special meal, people seem to try to kill us.

22. When was the last time you pulled lint out of your bellybutton?
What do I look like? A democrat?

23. Did you ever use someone else’s toothbrush?
There was this crisis where the president thought the Russians were launching nukes at us, but it turned out to be a BIG misunderstanding. But I stayed up for like 3 weeks without sleeping, so I probably did.

24. Do you REALLY floss everyday?
Of course. I’m a Georgetown alumnus.

25. what is your favorite cologne/perfume you always wear?
Cologne is for men who haven’t killed Irish terrorists with their own hands.

26. If you were on Double Dare, would you take the physical challenge?
Look. I’ve been dropped from helicopters onto submarines in storms; I’ve been shot at by drug czars; and I was there when a crazy Japanese pilot flew a 747 into the Capitol building. My wife and I survived nuclear blasts AND two different version of the Ebola virus. You got nothing on me.

27. What’s the largest living organism that you killed?
Shoot. I’ve killed so many things. Probably my father-in-law’s ego.

28. Did you ever take a lighting bug and smear its guts on your arm so you get a cool glowing effect like war paint?
Who writes these stupid questions?

29. What’s the best toy you’ve ever gotten in a McDonalds happy meal?
an armored limousine Hot Wheel

30. if you could be anywhere in the world doing anything right now what would it be?
Back in the Oval Office, ordering Clark and Ding to take care of people.

31. Can you juggle?
HELLO! Fearless leader of the free world here!

32. how do you feel right now?
nostalgic, see 13 above.

33. Do you remember that square candy bar called “Chunky”?
I do. Ate many a Chunky bar out of the CIA vending machines.

34. Predict the length of the next Peter Jackson movie.
Longer than Bear and the Dragon felt but somewhat shorter than Executive Orders actually was.

35. What was your favorite toy as a kid?
G.I. Joes.

36. Are you willing to go the distance?
That’s one heck of a question to ask me. How many of you have even TRIED to read all my books?

37. Did you answer question 17?
How could I? It was stolen by Arab terrorists bent on bringing down the free world through Internet hacking.

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Skvid Number One

Skvid = SKit on VIDeo

Last week our pastor asked me to put together a video skit to help illustrate a sermon in a series of lessons on stewardship: What happens when we overwhelm ourselves with choices and activities? Of course, it also illustrates beautifully the quirkiness of the Wilcox family.

I did the video in Windows Movie Maker, a free download for Windows XP. I had to overcome a quirk that kept locking the software up, discovering that previewing clips in the preview window wouldn’t work correctly, unless I dragged the clips to the timeline first. I can’t explain that, but wish I’d found the answer hours earlier. Movie Maker isn’t bad, but I need something that will let me treat the audio track from the video separately, as well as add more audio layers.

The film was shot entirely out of sequence, in order to meet the availability schedule of the actors (my kids), over the course of a very busy Saturday. The Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back clip was created by shooting our own HDTV, the quickest way I could think of to get the piece I needed.

Background music includes Ella Fitzgerald’s, “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” and the title theme from Back to the Future.

Overall, it’s a tad too long at just over 6 minutes (the goal was 5 minutes), and I never got around to including any video transitions. I may tweak it a bit in the next few days, especially if I try out a more advanced software package, and hope to get it down to 4 to 4.5 minutes. I recall seeing George Lucas talking about an old filmmaker adage, “Films are never finished, just abandoned,” and how he had the technology (and money) to keep going back to his films to finish them the way he wanted.

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Random Webness

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Amazing Dental Technology

This morning I reported to my dentist at 8:00 a.m. to have a crown done. They use a CEREC system, and I was amazed by the technology.

They shot me up with Novocaine, got rid of the old filling and ground down the disintegrating part of the molar. Then they use an IR imager to get a 3D image of the tooth that remains, and match—in beautifully animated 3D—the crown that will be milled to the base that remains, using the tooth outline against a database of about 500 3D teeth to get one that looks natural. (See the video above. It’s jaw-dropping.)

The dentist then can adjust this using a mouse and 3D view. They pick a tint that matches the rest of your teeth, throw a block of dental material in a tiny, computerized milling machine, and in 11 to 22 minutes, the crown is done.

This gets molecularly bonded (rather than just cemented) to the original tooth surface, and voila—essentially a new tooth, in less time than it takes the Novocaine to wear off.

I was out and on my way again at 9:20.

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Game Camp Nation – “Isaacing”

Isaac and David spent two weeks this year at Game Camp Nation, which has been operated for a number of years by our friends Phil Luchon and Steve Deyesso and their staff, originally under the name of “Camp Turing.”

[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”11″ gal_title=”Game Camp Nation, 2007″]

All the photos from those weeks can also be viewed here on Google Photos.

David and Isaac were among the first students to test a new curriculum designed for younger students. They developed games using the GameMaker software, which allows sprite-based games to be created using a relatively simple properties-panel-driven model. (Game Maker also features its own scripting language, and the ability to do more advanced things, even as much as a 3D FPS game.) Game Camp Nation also offers courses in game programming using C++ (which will probably be switched to Java next year), and 3D modeling and animation using AutoDesk’s Maya.

Each student gets his own computer to work and play on all day. Attendees also have some non-computer time to play board games and enjoy meals. Still, this was more of a “Geek Heaven” kind of place than one might be expecting in a summer camp. (I wonder if any of the children noticed that the conference room the hotel gave them didn’t have any windows.)


Isaac and David Outside the Conference Center used by Game Camp Nation for their Waltham, Ma., sessions.

Both weasels enjoyed camp immensely, and readily learned to create and debug games. They were up before I was every morning, and I let them stay late almost every night to participate in the network gaming tournaments that the camp runs at the end of the day. David got so tired one day that he fell asleep in the car in the morning, and then on the couch in seconds when we got home, sleeping there nearly 12 hours through the night.


Isaac and David with Game Camp Nation staff members Chris, Steve, and Joy.

We Have a Weiner Winner!

The game tournament is open to all camp attendees, whether they stay overnight or not. To keep things balanced among different types of games, they played FPS games (Halo and Call of Duty), RTS games (StarCraft and Command & Conquer 3), and Motocross Madness 2. Scores were kept all week, and the winner each week got a $50 gift certificate to Best Buy.

Of course that meant that Isaac and David were staying until 8:30 every night, but I figured it was worth the effort for two weeks.

Isaac came in first the first week, despite my dragging him out early one night. During the second week, he was leading by 100% of the second-place person’s score. Steve decided that dominating by that much for two weeks in a row would be called “Isaacing.”


Isaac with the huge Lego set he purchased, #7662 Trade Federation MTT

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Lana Lang Succumbs to Repeated Physical and Psychological Trauma

The Daily Planet, Metropolis, August 23, 2007
Lois Lane

Lana Lang (below) was admitted to the Metropolis Psychiatric Hospital (above) earlier today for an indefinite period of intense psychiatric care, after what has been described as an “intense, psychotic break.” Lana is known for having a number of strange, apparently psychiatric episodes. One associate we interviewed believed she had merely “gone Lana” again, citing events such as Lana’s brutally attacking and nearly killing confidante Chloe Sullivan, editor of The Torch, Smallville High School’s often tabloid-like student newspaper, or another period lasting several days when she believed herself to be the incarnation of a 17th-century French witch.


Lana Lang, an exceptionally traumatized young lady.

A medical professional within the psychiatric hospital provided details under the condition of absolute anonymity:

Miss Lang is the most severely traumatized case I have seen in my career, far worse than we see even from lengthy, close-quarters combat. Lana seems to have an intense fear of nearly everything, including hospitals.

She is recounting stories of being attacked repeatedly at the Talon coffee shop, her parents’ grave site, the Kent farm, Smallville Medical Center, her own residences, Smallville High School, several horse stables, and virtually every outdoor location she has traveled to.

She screams or sobs constantly about being hunted, attacked, and buried alive. There is little wonder her sleep is disrupted by incessant nightmares. Her medical records, among her numerous admissions for injury or unexplained illness, indicate she even barely survived being caught in a tornado several years ago. She often rocks back and forth in a corner, incessantly mumbling that her friends are keeping secrets from her, and she appears convinced that at any moment anyone around her might suddenly turn on her.

If even half the things she describes have actually occurred, it will be a miracle if Miss Lang will ever be able to leave this facility. But we will do our best to help her.

Clark Kent, who has been Lana’s friend from early childhood, appeared nervous, and refused to comment on her condition.

Here’s an interesting bit on what Lana Lang was like in the comic books.

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Why Can’t Things Like This Happen to Me?

A giant, smiling Lego man was fished out of the sea in the Dutch resort of Zandvoort on Tuesday.

Workers at a drinks stall rescued the 2.5-meter (8-foot) tall model with a yellow head and blue torso.

:: sigh :: That would have looked sooooooooo cool in my cube at work.

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Dual-Core Processors and Video Performance

I’d installed Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, a game which is a couple of years old, on my relatively new dual-core AMD Athlon machine at home. (It should run fine on both machines, and I own two copies, making it ideal for gaming multiplayer with the kids.) To my surprise, the game ran absolutely horribly—a first for this box—in fact, it was completely unplayable. The video, even in the opening movie, stuttered whenever it was trying to do a fade affect. In the mission I tried, the characters wouldn’t move, although I could pan the camera, almost like the game was trying to poll the keyboard wrongly. The video seemed far jerkier than it should have been, also.

So, I did the usual bit of updating the video driver and DirectX drivers, but that didn’t help.

After a little research, and a couple of forum posts that didn’t have the right answer, but did point to a related Microsoft Knowledge Base article, I learned the cause of the problem. With visions of having to patch my BIOS (a slightly risky operation), I wen to the AMD Web site as Microsoft recommended, and discovered a surprisingly straightforward solution:

AMD Dual-Core Optimizer – The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer can help improve some PC gaming video performance by compensating for those applications that bypass the Windows API for timing by directly using the RDTSC (Read Time Stamp Counter) instruction. Applications that rely on RDTSC do not benefit from the logic in the operating system to properly account for the affect of power management mechanisms on the rate at which a processor core’s Time Stamp Counter (TSC) is incremented. The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer helps to correct the resulting video performance effects or other incorrect timing effects that these applications may experience on dual-core processor systems, by periodically adjusting the core time-stamp-counters, so that they are synchronized.

A quick Windows install and reboot, and the game ran flawlessly—at 1280 x 1024 with all the video and sound options maxed out. Sweet!

I believe there is a similar utility available for Intel multicore processors.

For the benefit of others:

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Superman Trumps God: The NaNi Report and Other News

NaNi:

Here are some more anecdotes from the world’s cutest and oldest three-year-old:

  • We were “in the running” for a very nice outdoor grill that was being given away. When our friend Phil reported that it had gone to someone else, NaNi instructed, “You should have called ‘NaNi dibs’!” Quite a few people have commented on how good she is at conversing. This is something we’ve observed in her from very early on, but it does seem odd sometimes to have a three-year-old who thinks she’s on equal terms with everyone in the entire world, and can generally talk that way.
  • As parents, we all love it when our children begin to learn about God and develop a theological understanding of their own. Quite often, we forget that their grasp of things can be very different than we expect, at least underneath the common terms we hear from them. For example, Naomi and I have talked several times about “God v. Superman,” after a conversation that she had with David one morning. NaNi insists that Superman is better than God, despite her acknowledgement that God not only created everything, but saves people forever. Maybe she just thinks that Tom Welling is cuter than God.


    • To NaNi, there’s just no contest.

  • NaNi continues to learn cool things. She’s learned to stand on her head, and was really impressing us with her Spider-Man moves done while climbing on our exercycle. She can also type her name accurately and quickly, since I gave her a guest account and assigned her name as the password. (The user name is nonobvious for security purposes.) She can also run a Web browser and navigate all her favorite educational sites without difficulty.
  • The other day NaNi gave me a dollar from her purse. As I didn’t want to take her dollar, I sneaked it back in later. Last night on the way home from church, NaNi exclaimed, “Dad! You cheated. You gave me back the dollar I gave you.” Not only had the little weasel counted the bills she had, but she correctly inferred how the extra one had gotten there.

D’oh!

  • A few days ago, I left a pen in my pocket, getting spots on a whole load of laundry, not to mention marking the inside of the dryer. I was very disappointed to have made such a mistake. Nichelle got the dryer cleaned out after a few days, but I don’t know how many clothing articles were irreparably marred.

David:

  • Phil called David a slacker the other day, and he responded, “Uncle Phil, you know that everyone in my family is a slacker.”

Fighting (not Really):

  • I am attempting to do what few husbands would dare or desire. I am teaching Nichelle to argue. It seems odd to do so at this point of her life, and sometimes I wonder if this is what I really want, but her lifelong coping strategy had been to simply give in to the opinions of those around her, and she viewed all contradiction of her ideas as “being shot down.” Since I spend my days “in heated discussions” with my co-workers (it’s how software is developed, folks), she’d always believed I was shooting her ideas down—even though our discussions were virtually never heated—and even though I thought I was simply expressing a differing opinion and challenging her to defend her position, she viewed a single contradiction as “case closed.” It’s been fun, and a bit scary, requiring some adjustment from both of us, but she’s catching on quickly. (Ironically, if I had been asked to look back on the times we’ve disagreed in opinion, I would answer honestly that most of the time I see things her way in the end. However, my perspective did not and could not include the times she caved without discussion. Facinating.)

Swimming:

  • When I removed the cover (our first year with a mesh cover) from our pool this year, I made an interesting discovery: The pool was completely empty, save for a few puddles of nearly black water. NaNi, David, and Phil, and I spent much of Saturday sweeping and vacuuming out the bottom of the pool with the wet/dry vac. (There’s something really manly about operating a shopvac.) Then we scrubbed and rinsed every inch of it, repeatedly shop-vacuuming the dirt that had accumulated for the past several years. We patched the holes in the liner we found, and refilled the pool. Although the water is freezing, the results are astounding. The water is crystal-clear, and maintaining the chlorine level (so far) has been a breeze. If we ever move into a house with a swimming pool again, I’ll know to “kill and refill” it. (I should send pictures to my Mom and sister, who have always criticized my pool maintenance skills, just to prove the preexisting conditions weren’t my fault.)

Geekdom:

  • I’ve submitted several (well, three) articles to Slashdot recently, but have yet to have any of them go beyond “pending.” Apparently the world of Geekdom is not ready for my paltry contributions.
  • I’ve finally started a Lego MindStorms group at work. You can read about our exploits on our MindStorms@Work BLOG. We have about 8 people participating, and it’s been great fun so far. Our first project is a robotic candy sorter, which has turned out to be surprisingly challenging, at least based on our initial research.
  • The kids are crazy about various “geek songs” that we can play on our MP3 or CD players in the car. Thanks to iTunes and such services, we’ve been able to download a very unusual mix: “The Fuhrer’s Face” (Spike Jones) is NaNi’s most requested item. (NaNi has referred to it as, “Green, green, green,” after the sound the horns make at the beginning, “The Space Song,” and “The Future of Space,”—it took me a while to figure out which one she meant. “White and Nerdy” by Weird Al is nearly always asked for, as is his “The Saga Begins.” (We have those in video as well from iTunes for the home computer.) Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements” we are all working on, and we have been listening to “Skullcrusher Mountain,” “Chiron Beta Prime,” and “The Future Soon” by Jonathan Coulton for quite a while. Also in the mix under the nongeeky category are “Sway” by the Pussycat Dolls (the only song I’ve really liked by them), several LotR tracks, some Big Band, and my two indulgences of “You Can’t Hurry Love” (the Supremes), and “The Power of Love” (Huey Lewis and the News). Nichelle has several new acapella gospel CDs which we often listen to, but I can’t get them out of her hands long enough to rip them to MP3.

Movies and Television:

  • I think my favorite movie of the summer is going to be Ratatouille, which opens at the end of June. Why? Two words: Brad Bird. So far Spiderman 3 was excellent, with beautiful moral lessons, and Pirates III was a huge disappointment, even though we got to see it in digital video at Lowell Showcase. (Very little humor and character development.) Shrek the Third wasn’t too bad, although Shrek was very un-ogre-like in parts, and TMNT was reasonable (better than I expected), especially for the kids, although a big part of the dramatic/emotional plot seemed like a rehash of the first TMNT movie. And, would anyone go see Fantastic Four II if Jessica Alba were not in it? I think not. (Okay, maybe people will go see it with the desperate hope that two FF movies in a row can’t be awful.)
  • We’ve just finished up watching the second season of “Grey’s Anatomy.” Although we love the medical drama so much that we can barely stay awake watching “House” anymore, our concern is that it’s developing too much into a “soap opera” formula. We shall have to see what season 3 has delivered when it hits DVD. I will say this much, if the writers are medically knowledegable, it’s very evident that Grey exhibits the behaviors of one who has been physically or sexually abused as a child, although it hasn’t been hinted at in the first two seasons of the show.
  • We also just finished “24.” Frankly, I’m tired of it. I don’t think this season, by the end, was anywhere near gripping, and I honestly miss the filming style and direction from the first season, including Jack Bauer’s voiceovers to introduce each hour and the constant use of split-screen. I was actually disappointed when they flashed the return of the show next January. I simply do not care any more.
  • The one unquestionably, gloriously bright spot on television has been “Lost.” Wow. If you haven’t been watching, you have all summer and fall to catch up on the first three seasons via DVD. Do it.

Humor:

  • Tom in the Box News Service has a delightful, tongue-in-cheek (but never meanspirited) perspective on neofundamentalism, among other things. (The scary thing is how credible some of these stories are.)

Church:

  • Heritage Baptist has been wonderful for us. I’ve described is as “a whole congregation full of Debi Costines,” which is clearly an exaggeration, but there is a desire to know, study, and live God’s Word in its intended context that we have found only rarely. Travel on over to their Web site and have a listen to some of the messages.

Other stuff:

  • Nichelle’s health is better-than-perfect. She still outlifts me in all but a couple of weight-training exercises.
  • My Mom is getting married June 16, at age 80. We’re very excited about that.
  • I’m not sure why, but I really don’t like Jessica Alba with light hair.

John Hannah:

  • And, although it has nothing to do with this post, here’s a wonderful quotation from Dr. John Hannah:

    “Being biblical is not having a verse for what you believe; it’s having the weight of Scripture undergirding what you believe.” Dr. John Hannah